Prentice Hospital debate goes deeper than surface appearance

Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune

The old Prentice Women's Hospital in Streeterville was completed in 1975. It was designed by Bertrand Goldberg so that patients' rooms were within sight of nurses' stations and fathers could be present at childbirth. Preservation groups are fighting to get the building landmark status.

The old Prentice Women's Hospital in Streeterville was completed in 1975. It was designed by Bertrand Goldberg so that patients' rooms were within sight of nurses' stations and fathers could be present at childbirth. Preservation groups are fighting to get the building landmark status. (Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune)

Cheryl Kent, Special to the Tribune

Bertrand Goldberg did not believe in preservation. He said so. If he were still here we would be having a disagreement. Goldberg was, of course, the architect of the original Prentice Hospital as well as the much-loved Marina City; he died in 1997.

It's a surprise to few reading this: There is a fight over Prentice between its owner, Northwestern University, which wants to demolish the building, and the preservationists who want to protect it.

The building should be saved.

Prentice meets three — arguably four — of the city's seven criteria for landmark designation:

•It is a rare and innovative example of hospital design and of a thread of modernism characterized by expressive forms.

•It is the work of a well-known architect and engineer whose work is strongly identified with Chicago and who was influential internationally.

•It represents an architectural and social theme of humanism that was particular to its era.

•Its distinctive appearance is a neighborhood landmark in Streeterville.

That there is an argument has more to do with Chicago's elastic interpretation of a plainly written ordinance when a powerful institution is leaning on the city than it does with Prentice. It does not help that the extravagantly unconventional Prentice is not easy for everyone to love. But, preservation is not and never has been about pretty: Landmark designation is about protecting important architecture.

That's because pretty is mutable: It changes over time. Fifty to 100 years is distance enough for nostalgia and scarcity — as older buildings are demolished and replaced by new ones — to make buildings embraceable. That is how yesterday's outdated and ugly becomes today's beautiful and irreplaceable. Exceptional architecture is not mutable.

There is no question that Prentice is important. Goldberg's work is characterized by sculptural forms of concrete and by extreme engineering ingenuity. He was an early adopter of computers and used them to engineer complex structures. Goldberg was both an engineer and architect, an increasingly rare combination, which gave him a special ability to envision a building as wholly integrated, structurally and aesthetically.

Goldberg pushed the architectural envelope when he designed Prentice, completed in 1975. The flower-shaped concrete structure that blooms above the rectangular base is a structural marvel of nearly 50-foot-long floors that extend out from the building core without support columns. The four arches that spring from the building core help support the outer, petal-shaped concrete shell. The complexity of this structure is breathtaking, the chutzpah of its architect staggering.

Goldberg was not taking these structural risks to show off. A philosophy that formed the foundation of all his work was rooted in sociology and psychology. At Prentice, Goldberg designed the floors so that women would be able to see, from their beds, the nurses who were stationed in the middle of the floor. Goldberg's notion was to establish a direct relationship between patient and caregiver. It was a radical departure from conventional hospital design.

Northwestern has inadvertently provided proof of Prentice's uniqueness by way of its mediocre replacement, the new Prentice, a boilerplate building that is inhuman in scale and tedious in design.

In a period when four-square modernism was the dominant architecture, Goldberg took a different tack. Along with other Chicago architects like Harry Weese, Walter Netsch and Myron Goldsmith, Goldberg was expressive and restlessly innovative in his work. Internationally, he was related to Kenzo Tange and futurist movements such as the metabolists of Japan and Archigram in London. Goldberg, however, was far more successful than either of the latter groups at getting his work off paper and into construction. It was an adventurous time. Architecture was imagining a future enabled by new technology and growing knowledge. Prentice, with its air of retro-futurism, is an expression of that period and all its heady optimism.

Goldberg did not turn his back on modernism without considering it. He was a student of one of modernism's and Chicago's greatest architects, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Rather, Goldberg rejected the rectilinear steel-and-glass constructions of his teacher deliberately in favor of sculptural forms that he believed were better suited to human beings.

His thinking and his architecture was celebrated by critics and embraced by clients; aside from Northwestern Hospital there was the Chicago Housing Authority and others in the 1960s,1970s and 1980s. An exhibition that closed in January at the Art Institute of Chicago was devoted exclusively to Goldberg's work, demonstrating his importance in architectural history.

Northwestern wants to demolish Prentice in order to build a laboratory building that makes full use of the site — that is to say, a much bigger building than Prentice. Northwestern has argued that no site other than the one Prentice occupies will do.

Prentice was pulled from the agenda of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks in June 2011 in order to let the talks concerning the building to proceed between the university and the city. Preservation groups have been excluded from the conversations about Prentice. The content and course of the talks has not been disclosed.

Northwestern is quick to list what it does for the city. But it overlooks what Chicago does for the university. Part of the reason Chicago is a desirable, beautiful place to live is because of its varied architecture. Northwestern is being asked to be a good citizen, to give back to the city that has given it so much, by preserving Prentice.

Once a building is officially labeled a Chicago landmark, the owner must demonstrate financial hardship to evade the constraint of keeping the building. Since Northwestern University's financial solvency is not in doubt, and Goldberg's vote does not count, Prentice is headed for landmark status unless the university continues to succeed in circumventing the city's landmark process.

Chicago has more to regret than celebrate by way of protecting important architecture. In 1968, Chicago adopted landmark legislation. Under that window dressing, the Chicago Stock Exchange by Adler and Sullivan was allowed to go down in 1972.

Just three years later, Prentice was completed. In less than one decade, Chicago promised to protect its glorious built heritage, destroyed a masterpiece and built another. What now?

If Prentice is demolished, it will be for reasons other than its worthiness as a landmark.

To lose it would be to remove yet another remarkable work from the architectural history of this city.

In 2010, Cheryl Kent appeared as an unpaid expert in a video about Prentice Hospital for the not-for-profit organization Preservation Chicago.